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Sunday, 13 July 2014

Scotland And The European Election Result

Earlier this year saw the eighth direct elections to the European Parliament, and Scotland saw the election of 2 Scottish National Party, 2 Labour, 1 Conservative and 1 UK Independence Party Members of the European Parliament.

If the European election results were repeated at a general election, then:

The Scottish National Party would gain 17 seats from Labour and 6 from the Liberal Democrats - a net gain of 23.

The Conservatives would gain 4 seats from the Liberal Democrats and 2 from Labour -a net gain of 6.

The Liberal Democrats would lose 4 seats to the Conservatives and 6 to the Scottish National Party - a net loss of 10.

Labour would lose 2 seats to the Conservatives and 17 to the Scottish National Party - a net loss of 19.

This would give a final result of:

Scottish National Party - 29

Labour - 22

Conservative - 7

Liberal Democrat - 1

The Liberal Democrats would have lost their deposit in 29 constituencies, the Greens in 6 and the Conservatives in 1. Labour, the Scottish National Party and UK Independence Party all achieved over 5% of the vote in every constituency in Scotland.

This seat is also the most Unionist seat. If you take the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and UKIP to be the Unionist parties, then they have 73.49% of the vote between them. If you consider the Nationalist vote to be the SNP and Greens, then these parties have 24.50% of the vote between them. Indeed, across Scotland, 58 constituencies would see the combined Unionist vote ahead of the combined Nationalist.

One thing that is striking is the marginal nature of many seats. There are 14 constituencies where the gap between the first and third parties is less than 10%:

Edinburgh South West - 0.84% (SNP/Lab/C)

Ayrshire Central - 2.56% (SNP/Lab/C)

Edinburgh North & Leith - 3.17% (Lab/SNP/Grn)

Ayr, Carrick & Cumnock - 3.31% (Lab/SNP/C)

Edinburgh South - 3.53% (Lab/C/SNP)

Fife North East - 3.74% (C/SNP/LD)

Aberdeen South - 4.15% (SNP/C/Lab)

Renfrewshire East - 5.12% (C/Lab/SNP)

Glasgow North - 6.41% (SNP/Lab/Grn)

Stirling - 6.73% (SNP/Lab/C)

Dunbartonshire East - 7.31% (SNP/Lab/C)

East Lothian - 8.41% (Lab/SNP/C)

Edinburgh West - 8.62% (C/SNP/LD)

Argyll & Bute - 9.55% (SNP/C/LD)

In 5 of these case, the gap between the first and fourth parties is also less than 10%:

Edinburgh South - 4.27% (Lab/C/SNP/Grn)

Edinburgh North & Leith - 6.56% (Lab/SNP/Grn/C)

Fife North East - 7.97% (C/SNP/LD/UKIP)

Dunbartonshire East - 9.26% (SNP/Lab/C/LD)

Edinburgh South West - 9.76% (SNP/Lab/C/UKIP)

There is one more thing to note about these constituency results. The UKIP share of the vote doesn't change dramatically from constituency to constituency, and this is a property of how the figures are calculated.

We have two sets of data for each council area:

The number of votes won by each party at the European election

The number of votes won by each party in each ward at the last local elections

These are used to break down the European result by ward. For example, suppose a council area is split between two constituencies, with 60% of its electors in constituency A and 40% in B. It might seem logical to split each party's vote this way - so if a party won 10,000 votes, assume 6,000 were cast in constituency A and 40% in constituency B.

However, when we examine the local election results, we find that at the last local elections, one party won 75% of its local election vote in the part of the council area lying in constituency A. It would be sensible to reflect this in how we split the European result - so, assume 7,500 of its votes were cast in constituency A and 25% in constituency B.

It seems obvious to say this, but you can only vote for those who are actually standing. In a European election, everyone in Scotland can vote for the parties on the Scotland ballot paper. It doesn't matter whether you're in Selkirkshire or Ross-shire, you have the same set of candidates. At the General election, the main parties will contest practically every seat.

Now, not every party contests every seat in local elections. So we make an assumption that if someone supported party X, but X wasn't contesting the local election in their ward, they would choose to stay at home rather than vote for another party. In each ward, for each party that stands, we work out its share of the vote (as this is Single Transferable Vote, we consider first preferences) as a proportion of the electorate. We assume that if party X had stood in a ward which it didn't, then its vote would have been equivalent to its share in the contested ward where it achieved its worst result. For example, in a council area, X's worst result is 1.5% of the electorate in one ward. So, if there is a ward it didn't contest, with an electorate of 5,000, we assume that if it had stood, it would have won 75 votes (1.5% of 5,000) there.

For the generic "Others", we would, in the example above, put 60% of their vote in constituency A and 40% in constituency B. And likewise if a party didn't contest any wards in a council area.

For Scotland, the local results used are from May 2012 - when UKIP didn't contest all that many wards. This explains why their vote doesn't vary much. There may be pockets of support (look at the Greens in Glasgow's constituencies, for example) - the strong result in Fife North East can be explained by the influence of the East Neuk & Landward ward. The next local elections are May 2017 (assuming Scotland is still part of the UK), and it is likely that, now that UKIP has its first MEP, it will make a push to gain seats in the Scottish Parliament in May 2016 and then focus on local elections the following year. When I break the May or June 2019 European elections down into Westminster constituencies, there will be more data to use.